Critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks, requires GNSS based time reference to enable their proper functioning over a large area. Especially emerging telecommunications applications such as 5G or Time Division Duplex require a highly accurate and secure timing distribution. Failure of the time distribution service can lead to failure of critical infrastructure, resulting in blackouts or failure of the telecommunications network with damages exceeding the billion € for whole economies as well as severe safety and security risks for the general public. From the very nature of the GNSS systems, they are vulnerable to external, independent, and arbitrary radio interferences, jamming and spoofing. Consequently, the time synchronization may be interrupted or falsified, causing the real danger of time reference outage or alteration of the telecom network time reference. Therefore, finding approaches for detecting and mitigating radio interferences, jamming, and spoofing attacks is a critical issue for the security of telecom networks. Moreover, critical infrastructure requires safety layers, ensuring protection and integrity in the communication between nodes and terminals in the network (e.g., time synchronisation at the base stations of the telecommunications networks). The emerging technology of blockchain-based verification, identification and coding has been proven multiple times to be the future of information exchange applications. In the presented initiative, the "Critical infrastructure High accuracy and Robustness increase Integrated Synchronization Solutions – CHRISS will demonstrate first on the market, an integrated into one device, Galileo based timing distribution and synchronization solution enabling increased resilience to GNSS signals interference, jamming, spoofing and cyber-attack on fiber-optics distribution layer resulting in increased time distribution service availability, accuracy and reliability.

The EREMI team aims to develop and validate together an advanced higher education program, incl. Life Long Learning, on the interdisciplinary topic of resource efficiency in manufacturing industries, as well as the overall system optimization of low or not digitalized physical infrastructure by applying IoT technologies, towards sufficiently educated professionals on this economically, politically and technically crucial and highly relevant topic for the rapidly developing industries and economies of intensively economically and industrially transforming countries - Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Romania. These countries and their industries are currently experiencing an intensive development and the respective needed expertise profile for the needed engineers should be designed and built up in a sustainable way, by offering a respective higher education program.Currently Bulgaria, Romania and North Macedonia are facing a serious challenge in the higher and adult education and requalification levels, crucial for the success in the current reindustrialization situations there.Bulgaria and in particular the geographical and economic region of Plovdiv are facing highly intensively this challenge and therefore are willing, by getting a qualified support by a relevant and experienced partner from Germany – HSO – the highest developed industrial economy in the EU – to develop a higher education program addressing the improvement of resource and in particular energy efficiency in industrial infrastructures by using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence as a tool for the virtualization of physical production facilities. This issue has a high environmental and energy transition relevance as well.Quite similar is the situation in Romania.North Macedonia has experienced in the recent years an intensive wave of establishment of production facilities of many internationally active companies and has the chance, in the sense of this trend and before becoming an EU member state, to prepare well its education system for the challenges of the intensive re-industrialization.In all three previously mentioned countries, the resource and in particular energy consumption dedicated to industrial manufacturing is keeping the highest rate compared to all other economy sectors. In order to address and reverse this trend by adequately educated professionals on the field, developing and implementing innovative higher education and technological trends, and being supported by an experienced partner from Germany, a country already experienced this step of its industrial development in its younger past, the EREMI team will develop higher education content and particular B.Sc., M.Sc. and doctoral curricula on the field, and verify it at and/or supported by all 5 participating project partners. The program will be based on an interdisciplinary approach of academic and professional (also from suitable companies in the regions of the universities involved) trainers, as well as an intra-educational-system, involving students from all three academic educational stages mentioned before.After having developed and verified the online based learning content and platform, based on those a curricula for a joint degree higher education program on the EREMI topic, focused on the target group of postgraduate students, will be developed by all participating project partners. Its accreditation at each of the participating universities will happen after the project end, due to the specifica in the time pleanning related to it - varies in the different countries.The contents of the EREMI education program will underlay the open source rules and be publicly online accessible for all European relevant stakeholders and citizens through the EREMI website. It's publicity will be regularly reinforced by relevant events, social and public media publicaions, and most strongly through the involved volunteering partners from politics, R&D and for sure through all relevant platforms of ERASMUS+, the EC and such ones as LinkedIn.The final product of the project will be a free of charge online based interactive teaching/learning platform, built in Moodle, targeting university students and postgraduate professional, and serving relevant universities, pupils and companies for the fast and efficient professional education on this crucial topic for EU-wide industries, and especially to the industry in transformation, as in the region of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) due to the rapid industrialization trends and the lack of adequately educated engineers in this strategic industrial engineering and operations area. This product will be created, refined, validated and refined during the entire project runtime.A highly attractive publicly accessible project output, as one of the initial steps of its workflow, will be carried out - Foresight analysis on the Bulgarian and EU context of EREMI considering the current situation, challenges, and possible approcahes to address these.

The SWITCH project (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) addresses the urgent industrial need for developing and executing time critical applications in Clouds. Time critical applications such as disaster early warning, collaborative communication and live event broadcasting can only realise their expected business value when they meet critical requirements for performance and user experience. The very high requirements on network and computing services, particularly for well-tuned software architecture with sophisticated data communication optimisation, mean that development of such time critical applications is often customised to dedicated infrastructure, and system performance is difficult to maintain when infrastructure changes. This fatal weakness in the existing architecture and software tools yields very high development cost, and makes it difficult fully to utilize the virtualised, programmable services provided by networked Clouds to improve system productivity. SWITCH aims at improving the existing development and execution model of time critical applications by introducing a novel conceptual model (application-infrastructure co-programming and control model), in which application QoS/QoE, together with the programmability and controllability of the Cloud environments, can all be included in the complete lifecycle of applications. Based on this conceptual model, SWITCH provides an interactive environment for developing applications and controlling their execution, a real-time infrastructure planner for deploying applications in Clouds, and an autonomous system adaptation platform for monitoring and adapting system behaviour. The SWITCH consortium has well-balanced partners with complementary expertise from both academic and industrial backgrounds. By demonstrating the software using diverse use cases, the consortium specifically aims at exploitation of the business potential of the SWITCH results.

The rapid evolution of ICT has revealed the potential for centrally monitoring, controlling, and optimising the power grid. In this context, a more intelligent, responsive, and efficient, system has been devised, known as the Smart Grid (SG). As explained in the EU Third Energy Package the SG will support a dynamic two-way information exchange between utility companies and their customers, contributing towards a smart and sustainable energy management in Europe and the establishment of a wiser energy consumption mentality. However, besides the benefits of such an endeavour, the power grid will be exposed to security threats inherited from the ICT sector, while privacy issues and new vulnerabilities, related to the specific characteristics of the SG infrastructure, will emerge. The problem is assessed as crucial, if we consider that a potential attack to the SG may lead to cascading failures, ranging from destruction of other interconnected critical infrastructures to loss of human lives. Thus, the development of a security platform tailored to the SG is required, that i) can efficiently manage the plethora of SG nodes, ii) deal with potential malicious hardware or software modifications due to the physical access of the customers to the SG nodes, and iii) operate over heterogeneous systems. Considering all the above, SealedGRID aims at bringing together experts from industry and academia from cross-sectorial research areas having complementary background with the long-term goal to design, analyse, and implement a scalable, highly trusted and interoperable SG security platform. The platform will combine, for the very first time, technologies like Blockchain, Distributed Hash Tables, Trusted Execution Environments, and OpenID Connect, while for its realization the SealedGRID consortium is committed to a fully-integrated and multi-disciplinary secondment programme combined with a set of networking, dissemination, and exploitation activities.